It was October
2012. Roei Elkabetz, a brigadier general for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF),
was explaining his country’s border policing strategies. In his PowerPoint
presentation, a photo of the enclosure wall that isolates the Gaza Strip from
Israel clicked onscreen. “We have learned lots from Gaza,” he told the
audience. “It’s a great laboratory.”

Elkabetz
was speaking at a border technology conference and fair surrounded by a
dazzling display of technology -- the components of his boundary-building lab.
There were surveillance balloons with high-powered cameras floating over a
desert-camouflaged armored vehicle made by Lockheed Martin. There were seismic
sensor systems used to detect the movement of people and other wonders of the
modern border-policing world. Around Elkabetz, you could see vivid examples of
where the future of such policing was heading, as imagined not by a dystopian
science fiction writer but by some of the top corporate techno-innovators on
the planet.

Swimming in a sea
of border security, the brigadier general was, however, not surrounded by the
Mediterranean but by a parched West Texas landscape. He was in El Paso, a
10-minute walk from the wall that separates the United States from Mexico.

Just a few
more minutes on foot and Elkabetz could have watched green-striped U.S. Border
Patrol vehicles inching along the trickling Rio Grande in front of Ciudad
Juarez, one of Mexico’s largest cities filled with U.S. factories and the dead
of that country’s drug wars. The Border Patrol agents whom the general might
have spotted were then being up-armored with a lethal combination of
surveillance technologies, military hardware, assault rifles, helicopters, and
drones. This once-peaceful place was being transformed into what Timothy Dunn,
in his bookThe Militarization of the U.S. Mexico Border, terms a
state of “low-intensity warfare.”

The
Border Surge

On
November 20, 2014, President Obamaannounceda
series of executive actions on immigration reform. Addressing the American
people, he referred to bipartisan immigration legislationpassedby the Senate in June 2013 that would,
among other things, further up-armor the same landscape in what’s been termed
-- in language adopted from recent U.S. war zones -- a “border surge.” The
president bemoaned the fact that the bill had been stalled in the House of
Representatives, hailing it as a “compromise” that “reflected common sense.” It
would, he pointed out, “have doubled the number of Border Patrol agents, while
giving undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship.”

In the
wake of his announcement, including executive actions that would protect five
to six million of those immigrants from future deportation, the national debate
was quickly framed as a conflict between Republicans and Democrats. Missed in
this partisan war of words was one thing: the initial executive action that
Obama announced involved a further militarization of the border supported by
both parties.

“First,”
the president said, “we’ll build on our progress at the border with additional
resources for our law enforcement personnel so that they can stem the flow of
illegal crossings and speed the return of those who do cross over.” Without
further elaboration, he then moved on to other matters.

If,
however, the United States follows the “common sense” of the border-surge bill,
the result could add more than $40 billion dollarsworth ofagents,
advanced technologies, walls, and other barriers to an already unparalleled
border enforcement apparatus. And a crucial signal would be sent to the private
sector that, as the trade magazineHomeland
Security Todayputs it,
another “treasure trove” of profit is on the way for a border control
market already, according to the latest forecasts, in an “unprecedented boom period.”

Like the
Gaza Strip for the Israelis, the U.S. borderlands, dubbed a “constitution-free zone” by the ACLU, are becoming a vast
open-air laboratory for tech companies. There, almost any form of surveillance
and “security” can be developed, tested, and showcased, as if in a militarized
shopping mall, for other nations across the planet to consider. In this
fashion, border security is becoming a global industry and few corporate complexes
can be more pleased by this than the one that has developed in Elkabetz’s
Israel.

The
Palestine-Mexico Border

Consider
the IDF brigadier general’s presence in El Paso two years ago an omen. After
all, in February 2014, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) agency in charge of policing our borders, contracted
with Israel’s giant private military manufacturerElbit Systemsto build a “virtual wall,” a
technological barrier set back from the actual international divide in the
Arizona desert. That company, whose U.S.-traded stock shot up by 6% during
Israel’s massive military operation against Gaza in the summer of 2014, will
bring the same databank of technology used in Israel’s borderlands -- Gaza and
the West Bank -- to Southern Arizona through its subsidiaryElbit Systems of America.

Fair Use NoticeThis site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml . If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.